I believe I got pretty lucky. Happened to check Neogaf even though that place annoys me more often than not, and saw a brand new thread about Best Buy taking preorders that hadn't even been replied to yet. So I got my order in within about the opening 90 seconds or so, I figure.

Last edited by Atariboy on August 23rd, 2017, 2:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

That's weird. I'm set up to get an alert email from Amazon when they come in stock and I never got one. But yeah, Walmart.com's page just went from "item not available" to "item out of stock," so it can't be long now!

Yeah, same here. I know I setup Amazon to get an email when they were available. Heck, if I'd have known they were available, I'd have tried to stay up. Funny. Nintendo is doing everything possible to keep me from giving them money.

Amazon used a different page for the preorders, which is why no one got alerts. I thought I had an alert set up with Best Buy, but didn't get that either.

Walmart went online for pre-orders at 1:00 p.m. eastern time. I was lucky to see it happen... but it sold out within 2 minutes.. faster than I could even remember my Walmart password (haven't used it in years). So don't feel bad about missing that...you probably would have missed it even if you were there. After that, EB Games Canada went online... I got to checkout with one, only to learn they don't ship to the US so that was out! Then Target went online at like 1:15. The site was glitching and screwing up left and right... I got one in my cart and it kicked it out twice, lots of freezing up, before finally I was told it was "sold out". So Target was done in under 5 minutes. Then news came out that GameStop was doing in-store preorders. I realized that my girlfriend works within a 2 minute walk of one...so I asked her to check it out. She got there at like 1:30.. and told that computers were down! I decided to drive to my nearest Gamestop, 10 mins away.. computers down there too! Apparently it was a problem throughout the whole GameStop system. I was basically told "sorry, nothing we can do, no clue when it will be resolved, try again in an hour maybe." Miraculously, the guy at the GameStop my gf went to was willing to take her info.. and he called her saying he got his computer working. So she was able to score one for me there.

So that's my summary of what I know about what went down with preorders today. A total and complete mess, of course. No surprise there. I was following along on Twitter and everyone is annoyed at Nintendo and the retailers...

While I agree that pre-orders have been a mess, and Nintendo certainly doesn't deserve any benefits of the doubt at this point, I still think it's best to pump the brakes and see how the actual September 29th release goes. I'm not optimistic about it, but still, I won't judge the whole SNES Classic by its pre-order period. I think it was Allen Iverson who said "What are we talking about? Pre-orders? We're talking about pre-orders, man. We ain't talking about the game."

Perhaps Nintendo is being smart by using the pre-order period to determine how many SNES Classics they need to manufacture. I give that about a 5% chance, but we won't know for sure until the real release happens. And really, I'm ok with sell outs on the release date too... just as long as they eventually satisfy most of the demand before stopping production, unlike the NES Classic fiasco.

Retro STrife wrote:While I agree that pre-orders have been a mess, and Nintendo certainly doesn't deserve any benefits of the doubt at this point, I still think it's best to pump the brakes and see how the actual September 29th release goes. I'm not optimistic about it, but still, I won't judge the whole SNES Classic by its pre-order period. I think it was Allen Iverson who said "What are we talking about? Pre-orders? We're talking about pre-orders, man. We ain't talking about the game."

Perhaps Nintendo is being smart by using the pre-order period to determine how many SNES Classics they need to manufacture. I give that about a 5% chance, but we won't know for sure until the real release happens. And really, I'm ok with sell outs on the release date too... just as long as they eventually satisfy most of the demand before stopping production, unlike the NES Classic fiasco.

Nintendo is not being smart. If they were being smart they would've opened up the pre-order period immediately after announcement like most companies do, so they could try to accurately gauge demand. But no, this is typical Nintendo. Same tactics, different product. Nintendo can go jump off of a pier without a life vest. And the same with Walmart - they should've at least given advance notice or some kind of pre-dibs for people who got screwed over on that pre-order mess that happened a month ago. They had my money for days before they canceled my pre-order after Nintendo ordered them to, what did I get from that? A canned apology letter from some random person at Walmart. Yeah thanks for that, that was really worth letting you hang onto my money for a week.

If I happen to walk into a store and see one on the shelf, for MSRP, then I'll buy it but otherwise forget Nintendo and the retailers who go along with their artificial scarcity game plan tactics. I'd much rather have those games on the Switch anyway so I could play them on the train to work instead of being saddled to a TV and having to occupy yet another HDMI port.

I have a tracker app downloaded to my phone, to alert me when certain things are released or are given a preorder. Last night, I drank my nightly bottle of water, and passed out at nine. At 10:15, I woke up to go the bathroom and "SNES Classic preorder. Best Buy. Started fifteen minutes ago." I immediately ripped my phone from the charger, scrambled to the site, and ran through the steps, certain that the site would crash or tell me that the thing had sold out. Nope, I (amazingly) landed my preorder! And then I went to the bathroom. Ha!

So yeah, I only have my preorder because of my bladder! Thank you, bladder!